Every Friday morning, SAfm’s AMLive’s radio anchor Tim Modise speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Modise: South African scientists are building three aircraft that will fly without pilots, as unmanned air vehicles. Where is this happening?

Creamer: Unmanned vehicles are becoming far more popular and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria has fantastic infrastructure there, wind tunnels second to none in the Southern Hemisphere, and they are making good use of them by building these unmanned air vehicles, which are being bought more and more in the world because of the expense of crewed aircraft.

They have got three main projects there and one of them is the Sekwa, the Tsonga name for duck as it has a duckbill-type nose and is tailless. A very interesting one is the modular unmanned air vehicle. There will be four different varieties of that and it is this one that has really become a research platform.

You have many doctoral and master students involved there to get exposure to this unmanned air vehicle technology. They call them UAVs and they are building four of these. The first will be remotely put in to the air in mid-December and the second in mid-January.

So, you can see quite advanced research going on there, not commercial at this stage, but being a backbone to commercial activity. We have already got a company in Gauteng, Advanced Technology Engineering, ATE, that is building its own unmanned air vehicle.

South Africa is known for this technology. A lot of demand for it so there is a lot of development coming in. As I say, tremendous infrastructure at the CSIR in Pretoria.

Modise: Just as a matter of interest, what would these unmanned air vehicles be used for?

Creamer: Defence is the main thing, but, of course, with our 2010 coming up, you can use them for security. They can give you a lot of information from the air that you would require.

Modise: More than 200 retired engineers have been brought back to work to help 160 South African municipalities deliver services.

Creamer: Yes, we have got more then a hundred South African municipalities, which are declared as low-capacity municipalities.

That means that, even though there is money there for them, they can’t get that money because in order to get these municipal infrastructure grants you have got to do a feasibility study, scoping study and an application and, unless you do that, you don’t get the money.

So, in order to do that, they have yanked back engineers with the expertise who happen to be in retirement or maybe very senior. They have got more then 200 of those engineers back in order to twin with what they call young professionals.

It is no good getting these senior engineers in there to do a specific job. You have got to have the sustainability, so sitting with them are young professionals, who are getting that exposure and able to take it forward. So, it is a great model and has been going since 2006.

The concern is that it ends in 2010 and, in order to have some sustainability, there needs to be some certainty there. That is another issue that will have to be dealt with by Treasury. These billions are available to these municipalities and one of the other areas where they fall short is in finance.

They also brought in people on the finance side in order to complete the picture. They are saying that it is working so well that it is something that could be migrated into Africa. So, hopefully, more and more people with skills who retire, then get engaged to pass that information on to young people.

Modise: But now, unfortunately the National Energy Association, on the other hand, is warning us that South Africa is falling behind the world in modernising its energy base. What is going on.

Creamer: The South African National Energy Association’s Brian Statham is at the forefront of looking at what is happening in the world.

He has a lot of experience with Eskom and he made a plea at the last Sanea meeting, which is the South African National Energy Association, that we are falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to modernising our energy base.

Statham is saying that he does not want to model us on the First World countries of Canada and Denmark. He has been on a trip to Turkey and Mexico and he is saying that they know where they are going and they are determined to get there.

He finds a lack of that in South Africa. We are saying that we are coming to the anniversary of our first black out which we had last January and people are saying that there will not be a problem now, because there is a downturn in the economy.

A whole lot of furnaces have been switched off, mines in a downturn, so why worry now? This is the time to pause for breath and to come in with the new ideas. It is no good now not using the downturn cycle in order to prepare us for the bounce up and it always comes very suddenly.

He is saying let’s use this period now to get strong leadership. He wants private sector and government to sit down and work out a nice way forward and then to have a policy framework and the implementation from the private sector.

Modise: Well, those are some of the developments in the real economy that are taking place. Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly, he’ll be back with us at the same time next week.